This invention relates to continuous business form assemblies, and more specifically, to such assemblies when used, for example, as tickets and which are fed through mechanical printers.
Increased automation has resulted in a drastic upsurge in the use of continuous business form assemblies which may be fed, in continuous form, through imprinting devices such as mechanical printers and then severed into individual form lengths thereby rendering it unnecessary to feed individual form lengths manually into a printer. In many cases, the assemblies are quite thick, i.e. composed of many sheets or plies of paper. A typical example is an airline ticket or the like which frequently may have a thickness of 10 to 12 sheets or plies.
Transfer material as, for example, spot carbon or microcapsule image formers are disposed at the interfaces of the various plies for transferring variable information received on the ply actually contacted by the printer to the underlying sheets or plies.
Because of the thickness of the assembly, the mechanical printer must impact upon the assembly with considerable force in order to assure that the images formed on the sheets or plies most remote from the one being struck by the printer are legible. As a consequence of the force required, more often than not the sheet or ply actually contacted by the mechanical printer is wholly or partially unusable and must be discarded. This sheet or ply is conventionally known as the so-called "beater copy".
Many such forms utilized today are not actually fully continuous in nature. They are continuous in the sense that they employ carrier strips, however. Such a form will conventionally have a continuous carrier strip provided with a control punch margin for feeding purposes as the lowermost element of the assembly. Individual form lengths, conventionally known as "unit sets" are adhered to the carrier strip along its length and transverse lines of weakening extend across the carrier strip in between each unit set. Imprinting by a mechanical printer occurs on the uppermost sheet of the unit set. Typically, because of the necessity of providing control punch margins, the carrier strip will be wider than the sheets forming each unit set and as a result of this, once a unit set has received the desired variable information and is separated from the assembly, the section of the carrier strip to which it is adhered is removed from the underside of the unit set and discarded. At the same time, the uppermost sheet or beater copy of the unit set is discarded for the reason that it is virtually unusable as mentioned above. Thus, if the ticket or form is to have a thickness of, say, 10 sheets, it is necessary that the form originate with a thickness of 12 sheets, the eleventh being the carrier strip and the twelfth being the beater copy.
Of course, in order to make such a form, it is necessary to have manufacturing equipment of the type that can locate a unit set at a desired position on a carrier strip and secure the same thereto, usually by gluing. Conceivably, an alternate method of forming such a form without such equipment would be to form all desired sheets of elongated plies which are assembled together on a collator, a piece of equipment much more typically found in the manufacturing facility of a continuous business forms manufacturer than the type of machine required to place unit sets on a carrier strip. To the applicant's knowledge, this procedure has not heretofore been followed. Specifically, because of the thickness of the assembly, even the transverse lines of weakening extending through the plies by which the assembly may be separated into individual form lengths, are not so weak as to allow easy separation due to the number of plies involved. Consequently, it has not been considered that wholly continuous assemblies would be suitable for use with imprinters of the type typically employed, for example when providing variable information on airline tickets, since the means by which such printers sever individual form lengths from the assembly after imprinting are not sufficiently positive to insure complete severing.